


Break the Frayed-End Pieces

by taylor_tut



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Bucky Barnes & Tony Stark Friendship, Bucky Barnes Has Issues, Caretaking, Fever, Gen, Genius Tony Stark, Headaches & Migraines, Hurt Tony Stark, Hurt/Comfort, Illnesses, Imprisonment, POV Bucky Barnes, Pneumonia, Prison, Protective Bucky Barnes, Sick Character, Sick Tony Stark, Sickfic, Tony Stark Has Issues, Torture, eventually, rivals to friends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-02
Updated: 2019-07-08
Packaged: 2019-09-05 14:06:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 13,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16812151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taylor_tut/pseuds/taylor_tut
Summary: Tony and Bucky aren't on the best of terms, but they're working on it. Bucky tries (and fails) not to be irritated at Tony for being whiny and dramatic about the cold that he and the other human Avengers have come down with, but things go south when they find themselves suddenly captured, just the two of them, in a prison cell, Bucky with no metal arm and Stark with no arc reactor. Even under such extreme circumstances, it's impossible, maybe even more so than normal, for them to get along. If they could just cooperate for a minute; if they hadn't been too busy arguing to avoid capture; if Tony could just stop whining for long enough to think of a plan—they could be out of here in no time.Until it turns out that Tony's got what looks to be pneumonia.Maybe it wasn't all Stark's fault. If they'd just let him stay behind when he'd asked; if Bucky could just remember how to take care of another person; if only someone knew where they were—they wouldn't be in here in the first place. Now, it's a race against the clock to escape and it's up to Bucky to win for both of them.





	1. Chapter One: Contagion (2011) in Stark Tower

**Author's Note:**

> title is pretty-sounding nonsense from lyrics of the song I was listening to while I wrote it

There were benefits to being one of the only people who lived in Stark Tower that was human but Better™ was that now that Tony had a high schooler (and sometimes his high school friends, when Peter begged enough) hanging around the tower on a semi-regular basis meant that there was always SOMETHING going around that he couldn’t catch.

Natasha, Clint, and Peter Quill were all sitting on the couches in the living room when he came back from [classified] and he could tell that they were sick because Water for Elephants was playing on the television, commercials and everything, and no one was complaining. That, combined with the mountains of tissues and empty mugs of tea and the constant sniffling and coughing from the room’s occupants, was enough information for him to assume that the human Avengers were sharing a cold and that it was probably still just the first day or two of it. The last human Avenger whom he’d expect to spend a sick day in Stark Tower, the eponymous genius himself, didn’t seem to be part of the cuddle puddle they’d formed, which wasn’t unusual and did not mean that he wasn’t just as ill as the rest of them. Ever since Bucky had moved into an upper level of the Tower (which Tony had provided for him, it should be noted), he’d stopped spending much time upstairs with the others, confining himself to his lab for stretches of time that were reportedly even longer than his normal. If it weren’t such a maladaptive coping mechanism, Bucky would have sworn that Tony was avoiding him—which, coincidentally was exactly why he SHOULD have assumed as much.

Clint turned watery, red eyes on Bucky and pointed. “Quarantine,” he warned, “you should get out.”

“I’ll be fine,” Bucky said vaguely, grimacing at the pathetic sight before him. “Do you guys need anything?”

“The sweet release of death,” Peter requested, but before Bucky could make any specific arrangements, the elevator doors opened to reveal an equally-flushed, absolutely exhausted-looking Tony wavering in the doorway donning the same crumpled clothes he’d gone down there wearing three days ago.

“It lives,” Natasha quipped with a rough, nasally voice. Tony took in the scene and frowned. 

“Am I running a sanatorium out of my living room?” he asked, his own voice sounding shot, as well, but whether that was the cold he clearly had or the three days of not speaking to another person was anybody’s guess.

“Sounds like you could use a bed,” Peter said, scooting over on the couch and kicking off one of the several blankets that he’d gathered as a sort of offering. However, predictably, after sparing one glance at Bucky, Tony was already shaking his head. 

“No need,” he declined, undermining the believability of the response with a harsh cough he stifled into the sleeve of his hoodie. Was he wearing two hoodies?

“Come on, Stark. The consumption’s only contagious to those who don’t already have it,” Clint said, making spooky wiggly fingers toward Tony. 

“I’m the picture of health,” Tony replied, but he did tend to not drink enough water when he was in the lab, particularly for someone who’d been running a low-grade fever for the past few hours, and he was starting to get a bit dizzy, so he not-so-casually made his way to sit on the cushion Quill patted invitingly. “But I will do you all the service of dazzling you with my company for a few hours. It seems pretty bleak in here. What is this, Twilight?” 

Clint sighed. “If only,” he said wistfully, tossing Tony the remote. “None of us know how to work your stupid TV.”

“Could’ve asked FRIDAY.” However, he wasted no time clicking around channels until he found M*A*S*H*, the one show everyone in the Tower could usually agree on, and setting the remote back down beside him. 

“Consider us dazzled,” Natasha deadpanned. “There’s Dayquill in the medicine cabinet.”

“It’s my house; I know that.”

Clint scoffed. “I refuse to believe you know the location of even one self-care item in this whole tower.”

Tony had neither a good rebuttal nor the energy to keep bantering, so he smirked a little at Clint’s jab and sunk into the couch to nap.

For the next two days, they sat like that, taking turns doing things (read: taking turns calling for Bruce to do things for them). However, Bruce had been called to Wakanda, so they were on their own for the rest of the day.

And they were hungry.

“Hey, Tony, can FRIDAY make us food?” Peter asked hopefully, rousing him from a near-dose.

“Uh,” he stammered, barely awake enough to even comprehend the words being spoken to him, “no. Not unless it’s already in the microwave.”

“But I’m hungry,” he whined, kicking his feet a little for emphasis. The movement made Tony feel more nauseated. 

“Bruce said there’s soup in the freezer.”

“Will you make it?”

Tony shook his head. “Not hungry,” he replied, “ergo, not eating, ergo, not making.”

The famous last words of a man who somehow, after approximately four minutes of incessant begging, finally caved and agreed to heat up the soup for everyone. Just the effort of standing to get the bag of frozen soup was enough to make his head spin, but he forced himself to put the chicken-flavored cube into the pan and turned the heat on before he allowed himself to sit down with his pounding head resting on his arms. He’d set a timer, so he rest his eyes…

Tony woke up to the fire alarms blaring in the kitchen. There was a flurry of activity in the kitchen, including Bucky and Nat tending to the charred remains of soup on the stove while Clint and Peter catching him under either arm while he tried to fight to get to the fire. 

“Hey, that’s handled,” Clint reassured, wrestling his arms down to his sides. “Come on. Calm down.”

“I’m gonna get my phone to Facetime Bruce,” Peter declared, rushing away to grab his phone as Natasha came over to Tony’s side and Bucky rolled his eyes and disposed of the soup.

“S’rry; I was tryin—”

“Hey, woah,” Clint interrupted, shushing Tony before he could lethargically apologize for falling asleep at the table. “Bruce warned us that your BP sometimes bottoms. Come on; we’ll get you back on the couch.”

Bucky found it hard to believe that the genius that could work for hours on end in his lab or launch himself into space in the Iron Man suit might be laid up by simply trying to make soup with a cold, but kept his mouth shut as Nat and Clint supported him the whole way back to the living room, even as the cough that made him have to stop along the way visibly worried the others. Tony was dramatic, after all, and he’d be the first to admit it. Bucky was willing to write it off as nothing more than that.

Until the next morning when there was an urgent call to assemble. 


	2. Captured

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony and Bucky are captured, but Tony is in a little rougher shape than Bucky thought, so maybe he shouldn't push him so hard to think of a way out.

The alarms blared at midnight, alerting each of the Avengers in the Tower that there was evil afoot. Bucky didn’t sleep much—a combo of nightmares and serum, probably—and had already been awake and reading a book in the next room, so he was the first to gather in the commons. Wet sniffling sounds meant that the ill heroes were starting to rouse. While none of them seemed too eager about the prospect of being awake so soon, Tony groaned in response, putting a hand to his temple. 

“Wha’s goin’ on?” Quill slurred articulately, shaking the sleepy haze from his head. 

“It appears that robots are attacking downtown Queens,” FRIDAY explained. 

“When’re they not?” Tony grumbled, his palm migrating to press firmly into his eye socket. He leaned into his hoodie to cough deeply, a wet, rattling sound now accompanying his breathing. “Ngh, I thought drinking water was s’posed to help the headache.”

Bucky rolled his eyes. After Tony had fallen asleep in the kitchen and set off all the smoke detectors, the others had started fussing, half-dragging him to the couch to lie down and forcing water down his throat until he seemed to come back to himself a little more. They’d been acting like Tony had wilted like a delicate flower for a reason other than the very on-brand negligence to drink water or eat regular meals, showering him with attention and putting him to bed immediately afterward—the sort of thing that encouraged this behavior.

“Y’all should hurry and get ready,” he declared mercilessly. “Steve’s probably already waiting in the Quinjet for us.” 

Natasha and Clint, however, had their attention drawn elsewhere. “Are you feeling any better?” Nat asked Tony, who did look admittedly pale even for someone who’d just woken up. Tony, unsurprisingly, shook his head. 

“Can you manage a fight?” Clint asked, and there was a hesitation before he shrugged. Bucky had to admit that he was a little impressed at Tony for considering it—he’d expected him to just buckle immediately and back out. Suddenly, the elevator doors opened up to reveal Steve, already dressed in full Captain America gear, just as ready to go as Bucky himself was.

“Why aren’t we suiting up?” he asked like an impatient mother waiting for her kids to put on the church clothes that she knew they hated. His eyes flicked over and surely registered Tony, sitting hunched over his own knees and shivering a bit, but he’d known that he’d woken them up, anyway, so it wasn’t of much concern.

“We’re trying to figure out who’s going,” Natasha informed. Steve looked confused and annoyed. 

“Sorry, did the evil robots invading downtown wake you up? We need all hands on deck. That includes Stark.”

“I really don't know if that's a good idea, Steve,” Clint fretted. “He kinda faded out on us a few hours ago because he got dehydrated.”

The fact that Steve wouldn't press this unless it were absolutely necessary was clear to Bucky from the look on his face. Why did no one else see that?

“Thor is in Asgard,” he explained, “and we need someone in the air.”

“Spider-Kid can kind of do aerial—”

“No,” Tony cut off Clint’s suggestion aggressively, much to Bucky’s surprise. “It's finals week. Nobody is bothering Peter.”

“Stark, come on. This is life or death, here,” Natasha said, but Tony was already suiting up, armor swallowing him up from the reactor outward.

“And he's a kid,” he said firmly. “We should be saving the world  _ for  _ him, not making him do it himself. I'm good to fight.” 

“You're really not,” Clint asserted. Tony slammed the faceplate down in response.

“What's the plan, Cap?”

\---------------------------------------------

“Stark, you’re not  _ covering _ me,” Bucky snapped, not for the first time, just as he ducked below a robot that would otherwise have sliced straight through his neck. Steve had decided that the ill members of the team should be paired with the healthy to make up for their slowed reflexes. Sam had been partnered with Clint, Strange with Natasha, and Quill with Steve, leaving Bucky stuck with Tony.

“Yeah, yeah,” Tony dismissed infuriatingly as he turned sluggishly to take out the bot that had nearly beheaded him. Even with Tony’s voice so shot that he had to choose his words carefully, he managed to be absolutely intolerable. He’d already made a few excuses—the sun in his eyes, a bot on his tail, the wordless excuse of coughing that grated in Bucky’s earpiece. His complaint had seemed to snap him back to attention, however, because suddenly he was shooting again, protecting Bucky’s place on the ground. 

“Just keep your eyes up,” Bucky demanded once more. 

“Do you need more backup?” Steve asked worriedly into the comms. He needed to be able to give his full attention to his own battle, not have to referee another fight between teammates. 

“We shouldn’t,” Bucky accused, hoping that Tony would get the message. However, as if to drown out his words, Tony had started coughing again, and this time, he was losing altitude ever so slightly. “Focus, Stark!” he barked, but Tony was apparently too wrapped up in his own self-pity to even notice the drone in time to subdue it before it could run right into him and knock him out of the air. 

“Iron Man’s down,” Strange called before Bucky even registered what was happening—he’d probably known it was going to happen before they even left for battle. 

“Tony, status report,” Steve demanded, his whole demeanor stiffening. He slackened a bit when Tony groaned, the kind of groan that came from a fall more inconvenient than damaging. “Alright, Tony, you’re benched,” he caved. Because Steve was Steve, Bucky had to assume that it was out of concern rather than anger: concern which, in his opinion, was misplaced, because Tony was clearly fine. Even from his distance, Bucky could see him roll onto his stomach and stand up—and then immediately stagger to the left, raise his faceplate, and begin to dry heave onto the sidewalk. Okay, yeah. Maybe it was a good call. Bucky decided that he should probably help him onto the sidelines before he got back to the battle, so he began to run that way until the same drone that had knocked Stark out of the sky flew down to hover right in front of him. Cursing under his breath, Bucky swung; once, twice, again with his metal arm, which the drone immediately reached out a mechanical pincher and clung to. As much as he tried to fling it away, it was practically welded to his skin. 

In this time, Tony had composed himself enough to force his attention back to the battle, yelling something that Bucky couldn’t hear before rushing forward. The drone’s eye flashed red three times and Bucky knew that couldn’t be good. 

“Stark, fall back,” he warned, glancing up for just a moment to see that Tony was still running; “fall BACK!” A second pincher reached out to grab the Iron Man armor by the arc reactor core and then everything went white.

\------------------------

The next time Bucky saw Tony, it was when he was thrown into a dark, stone prison cell beside him. A guard opened the cage, two hands on Stark, one on the keys to the cage, and another pointing a vibranium gun at Bucky threateningly, then shoved him inside, where he immediately fell to his knees definitely hard enough to scrape them all up. He remained on his hands and knees for a moment, breathing hard, as the guard quickly locked the cage once more.

“Get some sleep, prisoners,” she drawled as she turned to leave. “Tomorrow is when the fun begins.”

Bucky maneuvered as best he could with just one arm, his metal one having been confiscated, to help Tony to sit up, but his helpful hand was shrugged off forcefully. 

“Did they hurt you?” he asked, more curious than worried. Sure enough, Stark shook his head, but just because he hadn’t been harmed didn’t mean he didn’t look terrible. His whole body, mostly unclothed because they hadn’t even given his shirt back, which Bucky thought was a bit rude, was covered in a thin sheen of sweat, and he was shaking. A gaping hole occupied the space where the arc reactor usually resided. Tony finally sat back onto his heels to look Bucky over and frowned. 

“Damn, they took your tech, too?” he asked conversationally, gesturing vaguely to Bucky’s stump. 

He nodded. 

“Figures.” Tony crawled back a bit to force himself into one corner of the cell, holding his arms as he shivered. The cell wasn’t too cold, but it was definitely damp, and without a shirt, Bucky could imagine that it might be uncomfortable, so he shrugged off his jacket, balled it up, and threw it, hitting Tony satisfyingly square in the face. 

“Here,” he offered, “wear that.” It seemed to daze him for a minute, but he gave a ghost of a smile and put his arms through the sleeves gratefully. 

“Thanks.”

Tony’s eyes slipped shut and he leaned his head against the wall as they sat in silence for a moment. 

“Is it okay that they took out the arc reactor?”

“Hmm?” Tony startled like he’d zoned out completely. Bucky gestured to his chest, and he seemed to understand. “Oh,” he realized, “that. Yeah, my heart’s not gonna stop without this version, so it’s fine. Annoying not to have the suit, though.”

Bucky was a little taken aback by the idea that a different version of the reactor had apparently kept him alive at some point, but that was a question for a different day, or even better, something he could read in Tony’s file to have all the pleasure of being nosy and none of the inconvenience of actually having to talk to Tony.

He’d really thought that Stark was going to be a nice guy when he’d insisted on letting him live in the Tower. Hell, not just offered—he’d remodeled a whole floor just for Bucky, just like all the other Avengers had gotten. He’d offered gift after gift for the first month: an upgraded metal arm, new weapons, training bots specifically designed to be a perfect match to spar with him. Honestly, it had toed the line between flattering and creepy for a while, but then Tony had started to ghost away. He’d leave to work in the lab any time Bucky came into the room, and honestly, Bucky had started to worry about how much time he was spending down there. He knew all about Ultron, after all…

But when he’d asked Steve about it, Steve had decided to confront Tony, who had told Pepper about the accusation masquerading as a conversation, and Pepper had ripped Steve a new one for assuming the worst of Tony with no evidence of wrongdoing. It had all been so terribly tense that Tony and Bucky had just decided it was easier to find comfort in avoiding one another like the plague, nodding in acknowledgment of presence when they passed each other in a hallway, and knowing that the complete and utter dislike was more methodical than personal. Tony was still uncomfortable around Bucky, and he dealt with discomfort by closing his eyes.

His eyes were closed now. 

“So, what’s the plan for getting us out of here?” 

Tony forced hazy eyes on Bucky and blinked slowly. “I dunno,” he shrugged, “what are you thinking?”

“You’re the genius,” he asserted, “so you tell me. How many times have I had to hear the ‘in a cave with a box of scraps’ speech? You’re in your element, right?” 

He nodded reluctantly, sat up a little straighter, and pushed the heel of his hand against one eye. Coughing a few times into his elbow—had he sounded that bad before?—Tony visibly tried to think of a plan. With steam practically pouring out his ears from the gears in his head turning, he sat for several minutes, almost seeming to have to fight to stay awake as exhaustion washed over him in waves every few minutes. They sat like that, in silence, the only sound being the dripping of water and the whistling noise emanating from Tony’s breathing, for several minutes before Tony appeared to throw in the towel, pulling the jacket around him further.

“I’ve got nothing,” he lamented, trying for nonchalance but failing to keep a whispy cyan note of desperation from his voice.

“You can’t have ‘nothing.’”

“I’m—I just need time,” he argued, almost fearfully. “My head is pounding and I can’t think straight; my fever is too high. I know I can think of something if I can just get a nap. Recharge.”

Bucky frowned. THAT didn’t sound like Tony at all. Whining may have been his MO, but he definitely didn’t do “damsel in distress.” Plus, since when had he developed a fever? Had the others had fevers as well? No one had mentioned it to him if they had. 

Ultimately, there was no arguing with the spent-looking Tony that sat hunched over and shaking before him. Yelling at him wasn’t going to allow him to think through a fever fog and keeping him awake was likely to only make things worse. 

He sighed to reign in the disappointment and slowly began to feel a little worry start to replace the irritation. 

“Alright,” he agreed, “take a nap.”

Tony nodded. “I only need 20 minutes,” he promised, curling up on his side. His damp hair fell into his eyes and, as his face passed through one of the few slits of light in the cage, Bucky could see that he was ghostly pale. 

“Not like we’re going anywhere,” Bucky huffed, “so take your time. Don’t force it. You really don’t look so good.” 

Instead of complaining further, which almost made him more nervous, Tony just closed his eyes. Bucky waited for his breathing to even out, but, alarmingly, it fell just short even once it was clear that he’d fallen asleep. He was starting to doubt that Stark just needed a nap, but since that was all he could give him right now, he thought he should let him have it, anyway. 


	3. Prisoner's Thesis

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky thinks back on some old memories as Tony sleeps and wakes up.

Bucky couldn’t sleep. The adrenaline pumping through his veins was enough to keep him hypervigilant, able to hear every footstep as the guards made their rounds, every drop of water as the condensation on the ceiling hung heavy enough to form puddles, and Tony’s ragged breathing. There was no faking or exaggerating that rasp—it sounded as if he’d inhaled water, like if someone turned him upside-down, that a pool would drain from his open chest cavity.

Fuzzily, just beyond his reach, something about it sounded familiar. Steve had told him that he’d taken care of him when he was ill, which was apparently pretty often before the serum, but nothing about the stories seemed to be enough to spark a real memory of it. After all, to look at Steve now, during all the tense, anxious nights that he spent in his room, lying on his chest to hear the loud, slow, strong beat of his heart, it’d be impossible to assume that he’d ever been a sickly young man. 

However, hearing it again first hand was a different story. Suddenly, he was 24, holed up in a tent with Steve, wanting desperately to go get a medic but with Steve adamant that he shouldn’t; it was a miracle he managed to get through the first medical exam without being told he wasn’t healthy enough to join the army, and there was no way that he’d get so lucky again. So Bucky would make himself little promises: if his fever climbed so high that he couldn’t wake Steve up, if he fainted again, if he got to the point where he could no longer stomach water—then he’d go get their superior officers. He’d sit up all night replacing a cold washcloth over his forehead and coaxing meager amounts of liquid down his throat when he woke. 

Tony began to stir in his sleep, twitching uncomfortably, and the realization that he was NOT, in fact, exaggerating how poorly he felt or how ill he was slammed into Bucky like a freight train. He scooted closer to Tony to get a better look at him and grimaced at what he saw. Tony was still shivering, even under the jacket, but he’d stopped sweating, which probably meant that he was dehydrated. Before he could fully press a hand to his forehead to check for a fever, his arm was swatted away by a startled-awake Tony, whose wide, bright eyes immediately began to dart around the room.

“Hey, Stark, relax,” Bucky reassured. It wasn’t okay and he didn’t know what else to tell him, but it didn’t seem to matter, because either recognition or just exhaustion seemed to suck the tonicity out of Tony’s muscles and he went slack as quickly as he’d tensed. 

“Barnes?” he asked confusedly. “Where are we?”

That planted a seed of worry in Bucky’s stomach. “Take a minute and think about it,” he instructed. “Try to remember.”

Instead, Tony tried to take a deep breath to calm himself down and it backfired massively as it launched him into a harsh, deep coughing fit that left him holding his chest. It sounded painful enough that Bucky felt retroactively guilty for yelling at him so much on the mission. He wondered if he really disliked Tony enough to have missed something as severe as this and knew that the answer lied in the fact that he’d spent the weekend getting tea for Natasha when she didn’t want to move, fluffing Clint’s pillows, and stacking more blankets atop Peter, then had immediately turned around and told Tony without even investigating further that there was no possible way he was ill enough to skip a battle. 

“I don’t… I’m not,” he forfeited. He reached up to grip his chest—was that from acute pain, or was it a habit formed by years of chronic aching?—and began to hyperventilate when his fingertips fell into the hole in his chest. “The reactor,” he breathed, turning desperate, panicked eyes on Bucky, “my heart can’t—”

“Tony, come on; breathe,” Bucky insisted, using the rarity of his first name with the hopes that it might make him feel better. “You said that was okay, remember? That one just powers the suit. It’s not gonna hurt you.”

Tony didn’t seem to come to a full understanding, but believing him was easier than continuing to freak out, so he nodded despite looking unconvinced. Bucky helped him to sit up when he struggled to do so himself. 

“Can I touch you?” he asked. With friends like the Avengers, you learned pretty quickly to ask before surprising someone unless you wanted your wrist snapped. Tony’s head lolled forward a little in what Bucky had to assume was a nod, so he pressed his palm flat across his forehead and winced, cursing under his breath. The skin was dry and terrifyingly hot. This was the kind of fever that would have had Bucky defying Steve’s wishes and scooping him up in his arms to bring him straight to the med tent. but however brutal the army might have been, this wasn’t the military, and there wasn’t a single person around here who could help them.

Bucky knew better than to become optimistic at the sound of approaching footsteps. Apparently, they’d sat long enough that it was morning, though, because the guard that came to check on them had food and, blessedly, water in his hands. Instead of opening the whole door, he unlocked a small slat at the bottom and slid the provisions underneath. On the tray, there were two bowls of what looked like plain grits (but probably were nothing so familiar) and a jug of water barely bigger than the bottle Steve took with him jogging. Bucky didn’t say a word, merely glared as the guard grinned maliciously. 

“Better eat up,” he warned forebodingly. “You’ll need all your strength for this afternoon.” Bucky ignored the threat in favor of uncorking the cap from the water jug and tearing off a strip of fabric from his shirt sleeve, wetting and folding it before laying it across Tony’s burning forehead. He wasn’t sure how much time passed like that, silently focusing on just how nerve-wrackingly quickly the fabric became warm and replacing it as soon as it did. Eventually, Tony opened his eyes again, this time looking a little more present.

“Bucky,” he rasped, leaning over to cough into his elbow. Bucky had a cup of water waiting for him to sip by the time he caught his breath, which he accepted gratefully. 

“Are you with me this time?” Bucky asked, and Tony nodded, clearly confused by the question—God, he mustn’t even have registered those delirious moments. “Good,” he continued, “because I’m pretty sure we’re about to get tortured and you need to be able to handle it without giving up any SHIELD secrets.” 

Tony’s eyes widened and Bucky felt a little guilty, but gauging by the eager bounce in the footsteps that were approaching down the hall, he didn’t think he had time for the gentle, soft version. Blunt would have to do. Tony shook his head as if to clear it, pressing his hands over his eyes again in that way he’d been doing lately to alleviate the pressure and pain in his head. 

“I don’t even think I could think clearly enough to give ‘em secrets if I wanted to,” he admitted, and Bucky genuinely couldn’t tell if that was supposed to make him feel better but had a sinking feeling that it was. 

“Just try to keep your mouth shut until we can get out of here.” 

Tony’s face, surprisingly and devastatingly, fell at that, too physically and emotionally drained to fully hide it even though he tried his best. “I’ll think of something,” he promised frantically. The look in his eyes alone was enough to raise Bucky’s blood pressure, so he couldn’t imagine that it was doing Tony any good. 

“I’m just as much responsible for that as you,” he promised. “We’re a team, right? We’ll get out of here somehow. And even if we can’t, I’m sure the others are working on finding us.”

“But what if they can’t?” Tony asked. In his own boundaries, Tony was lax, flexible, pushed far beyond what he should, but in what he expected of others, Bucky was beginning to notice, he was rigid. He could launch himself into outer space to save the world but couldn’t bring himself to think it realistic that the others would find them here, or maybe it was that he didn’t trust that they would actually care to come for him. Rhodey was the only one who consistently found him, Pepper was the only one who consistently held onto him, and all he knew from every other damn person in his life was letting go and losing. Maybe he thought himself replaceable; maybe he thought himself expendable without even so much as a replacement. Whatever the case, all Bucky knew was that the only person that he’d cared about had found him after 70 years, then went through hell and back to fix him just because they were best friends, but that everyone Tony trusted left him for dead in a desert or in a cave or alone with a bottle of scotch in the Tower or in… in fucking Siberia. 

“You’re getting out of here even if you can’t think of a plan, alright?” Bucky reassured. “You’re really sick, Stark. I don’t expect you to save the day, not like this. Let me and the other Avengers handle it. No one is leaving you behind this time.” Tony swallowed against a lump in his throat—or it may have been nausea, who can say?—and nodded, sitting up against Bucky and taking a few more guided sips of water to clear his head before the guard stood in front of the door wearing a mocking, condescending smile. 

“Ready to go meet the Boss?” he asked, and by the hands that wrenched Tony and Bucky both from the floor and immediately placed them into too-tight handcuffs, Bucky had a feeling the question was rhetorical. 


	4. Restraint

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony and Bucky are taken to a secondary location for torturing purposes. You NEVER want to get taken to a secondary location.

Bucky watched Tony struggle to stay upright as they were both led down a long hallway in restraints, Tony in handcuffs and Bucky in a personalized contraption that secured his flesh arm tightly behind his back. Every few steps, Tony would trip over a foot that he didn’t have the strength to fully pick up from the ground, or start to sag downward against the weight of gravity, or lilt dizzily to one side or the other. The guard who tugged at him was rough and impatient, steering him by the collar of his shirt and muttering ugly things under his breath. 

“Stalling will not change your fate, prisoner,” he warned with a snarl, but of course that didn’t register for Tony because he wasn’t even coherent enough to be pulling anything—it was a genuine struggle to put one foot in front of the other. Bucky could barely stand to watch, trying to weigh whether it’d be a worse idea to let them continue to think Tony was being intentionally belligerent or to admit weakness and confess that he was ill. The choice was made for him when Tony’s legs began to wobble and cave underneath him and the guard took a small device out of his pocket and jammed it hard into the side of Tony’s neck, making him yelp in shock and pain and effectively pinning him to the wall. 

“Stop it!” Bucky demanded, trying to lunge forward and being hit with the small metal prongs of his own guard’s taser. It burned like hell, searing, electrical pain coursing through his neck so strongly that he was sure for a second that Thor had come to rescue them with all the lightning that flashed across his eyes. When the device finally beeped into automatic shutoff, he was breathing rapidly and sweating. As soon as he got his thoughts together enough to be present in the moment, he turned his attention to Tony who was, surprisingly, getting to his feet with a little assistance and watching Bucky like a hawk. 

“You okay?” he asked, his voice a deep, chesty rasp riding on congested air. Bucky nodded and it seemed to relax him a little.

“That’s what happens when you don’t behave,” the guard explained, shoving Tony forward once more until they arrived at a dimly-lit room at the end of a twisting catacomb of hallways. Bucky was strapped into a chair in the corner of the room, while Tony was tied to one in the dead center. His skin looked even paler, almost jaundiced, under the single, unshielded light bulb that illuminated the room in a dull, yellowish glow. 

“The boss is here,” one guard said to the other, both of them assuming a formal salute position as an older woman, probably in her 50’s and appearing to be at least half Terran, entered, her head held high and her posture stiff. 

“At ease; at ease,” she rolled her eyes, “you know you don’t have to do that unless we’re in public.”

“Merely showing you the respect you deserve, ma’am,” Tony’s guard replied. Their loyalty seemed to come from a place of admiration rather than fear, much to Bucky’s confusion, but both guards did as they were told and slackened a bit. 

“Who the hell are you?” Bucky asked, earning himself another painful tase in the side of his neck. When he blinked back to reality, he realized with a grimace that they’d given one to Tony, too—fuck. While he hated to give in to terrorist demands, they sure knew how to make a guy shut his mouth. 

“Even if I told you my name, I doubt you’d call me by it,” she shrugged nonchalantly, opening a briefcase and tugging two long, slender metal gauntlets over her hands and arms. “You can call me Boss—or ‘that bitch,’ or ‘fucker,’ or ‘mommy,’ or whatever gets your rocks off. I know both of you are used enough to captivity and torture that I’m not going to be able to win your favor, so I won’t try. I’m going to skip straight to what I want and why you should give it to me.”

She grabbed Tony’s face in her hand, and if she noticed the burning heat radiating from it, she didn’t say anything. He managed to muster up the strength to look her in the eyes directly for as long as she held his face there, but Bucky could tell that he was drooping again. As soon as she released him, his head hit his chest and just sort of lazily rolled up to his shoulder so that he could watch her from the corner of his eyes, panting hard. If he weren’t strapped down, he was sure that he’d be ass-up on the ground in front of the chair and probably wouldn’t be able to get back up. 

“SHIELD doesn’t dispose of any of the massively powerful items that they confiscate from any power-hungry madman of the week,” she began, circling Tony like a lioness. “They merely lock all the things they find that shouldn’t ‘fall into the wrong hands’ behind vaults and in repositories. But has anyone ever asked if SHIELD should be the ones who hold that massive amount of power? Are their hands really those in which we want to entrust our lives?”

Bucky snarled; the idea was ridiculous. “SHIELD is a worldwide agency committed to protecting the world,” he bit. “Of course we want them to have it.”

She turned wild eyes on him. “You’ll speak when you’re addressed, prisoner,” she barked. The guard next to him pressed the button on the taser once more and in the dimness of the room he could see the lightning jump between the prongs, a reminder of what would happen if he didn’t hold his tongue. “The things I want are behind locked doors, and if you want a door shut right, you get the smartest locksmith. Anthony Stark,” she said, spinning to face him. “I’d bet my life on the fact that you were instrumental in creating the vaults behind which they keep their treasures.”

Despite exhaustion and the fact that he was barely even coherent, Tony managed to huff out a humorless laugh. “I don’t know how old you think I am,” he said in a voice that was clearly straining for even the meager amount of power it held, “but SHIELD has been around way longer’n I have. I don’t know anything about its security.”

She rolled her eyes. “Of course, not the original vault codes,” she said as if it were obvious, “but I know for a fact that they were renovated within the past six years. About the time that you started working with the Avengers, no?” 

Tony scowled in a way that Bucky couldn’t read enough to tell whether her accusations were way off or spot on. It didn’t seem to matter to the Boss, as she motioned with her hands for another guard to step away from the doorway with a jug of water, not unlike the one that had been among their provisions that morning. Briefly, perhaps stupidly, Bucky thought for a moment that she might try to take a soft approach, butter Tony up and try to make him switch sides. However, the absolute panic in his eyes as he watched her approach with both the jug and a washcloth was enough for him to decide that he was horribly, horribly wrong. 

Tony was already gasping for breath before she hit a lever that tilted his chair back and strapped his head down. Bucky could do nothing but watch helplessly, trying and failing to struggle against his own restraints as he watched the Boss drape the washcloth over Tony’s face and unceremoniously pour a steady stream of water over it. 

The choking sounds that he made were incomparable, haunting. Both Bucky and Tony had been waterboarded before—something that had come up in an ill-advised, drunken game of Avengers “Never Have I Ever,” coincidentally one of the only things they actually had in common—but Bucky had never seen another person go through it. Panic response immediately washed over him, making it hard to focus. Memories were pushing at the corners of his vision, threatening to take him back to Siberia if he allowed them even an inch closer. He thought of Tony’s original reactor, the one that had magnetically kept the shrapnel from piercing his heart, and pictured his own mind similarly. He had to keep the flashbacks at bay in order to stay grounded. Tony’s shouting was equal parts triggering and grounding, transportative while managing to remind him why he had to remain present. 

The woman continued to pour water over his face for so long that Bucky began to question whether she really knew what she was doing enough to not kill him, but after what seemed like minutes, she stopped, allowing him to fight for agonal breaths against the sopping fabric. Tony was coughing hard, unable to pull a good breath into his lungs, for several minutes, and then he stopped. An electric chill crawled down Bucky’s spine as he waited for Tony to take another breath and he just… didn’t.

Fuck.

“Fuck,” the Boss cursed. She removed the cloth from Tony’s face and he didn’t move. It wasn’t until she slammed her fist hard into the center of his chest that he finally sputtered awake, sucking in a rattling breath that turned into a painful-sounding coughing fit. 

“Stark,” Bucky called, “Christ, you alive?” Tony hadn’t stopped coughing, but nodded. His face was turning an alarming shade of crimson, but the woman wasted no time in asking him questions once more. 

“Are you ready to tell me what I want to hear?”

“Don’t know anything,” he replied through gasping breaths and chest-rattling coughs. She smiled almost fondly before setting the fabric over his face once more with a wet slapping sound that made Bucky’s skin sting. 

She did this twice more, though she must’ve cut back on the amount of time she made him spend under the stream of water because Tony didn’t go into respiratory arrest again. After she stopped pouring the third round of water, Bucky could see small red dots beginning to stain the fabric from the underside. Blood, he knew, from hopefully his raw throat, but Bucky almost never got what he hoped for.

By the time she was gearing up to waterboard him a fourth time, his eyes were closed and his body was limp. He was breathing, that much Bucky could hear even from the corner of the room, but it seemed as though he couldn’t muster up the energy to do anything else. 

“You’re running out of time, Dr. Stark,” she pointed out. Bucky had never heard anyone call him that before, so it really had never occurred to him that Tony  _ did _ , in fact, have a Ph.D.: in fact, multiple. 

“Just leave him alone,” Bucky pleaded. Pride was out the window—Stark, after all, had no choice but to let Bucky see him at his most vulnerable right now, so why should he care that Tony see him beg? “Use me instead. I have more HYDRA information in my head than I even know. You can torture it out of me all you want.”

She laughed unpleasantly. “Your mind, Winter Soldier, is a maze too complicated to be solved by simply pushing through the walls. While I’d love to know what you know, I fear that HYDRA designed you in a way that would have you die well before you’d even be able to remember anything vital, much less before your high pain tolerance would force you to tell me.” 

“Well, you can’t keep beating the shit out of him,” Bucky reasoned. “He’s barely even conscious.”

Nodding, the woman seemed to consider this. “Then I suppose I’ll have to wake him up.” She motioned for another guard to bring her a small vial and a syringe, which she carefully fileld.

“What the hell is that?” Bucky demanded, but she’d decided that she was finished conversing with him. “What the HELL is it?” 

Once it was full, she went around to Tony’s side, down by his legs rather than above his head. It said a lot about his level of consciousness that he didn’t even look up at her even as she plunged the syringe deep into his thigh and he bit back a grunt of pain. The results were almost immediate—as soon as Tony opened his eyes, Bucky could see his pupils blow wide and his breathing pick up so fast that his chest was heaving. 

“Tony?” he called, struggling against the back of the chair as if he could break the restraints and reach him. 

“S’fine,” Tony managed to reassure through gritted teeth. The good news, he supposed, was that he’d apparently given Tony enough water that he could sweat again, as evidenced by the sheen of it that broke out across his forehead. “Damn it—what the hell is that?” 

The boss smiled patiently, so pleasantly that it sent shivers down Bucky’s spine. 

“You seemed tired,” she said near sympathetically, “unable to focus. I’ve given you something to help.”

“He can’t focus because he’s got a fever through the roof,” Bucky interjected, hoping against hope that maybe she’d have a change of heart, decide that amidst the torturing them for military secrets that perhaps she actually cared whether her prisoners survived their captivity at least until she got what she wanted. He had no such luck.

“Aw, is someone feeling under the weather?” she cooed, her tone shifting rapidly from kindly grandmother to hardened criminal. “Guards, ensure that they get a cooler cell this time, one closer to the center of the building. I wouldn’t want you to overheat; poor thing.”

Tony had begun swallowing compulsively and his face had gone palish green. He was forcing himself to breathe through his nose rather than his mouth, forcing the air in and out in thick pants. The guards began to undo both their restraints. Despite that Tony was now alert, he wasn’t steady enough to get his feet below him to walk properly, so he stumbled ahead of Bucky. 

“I’ll be back to collect you both in a few hours. Hopefully, the bump I’ve given you will help you think about your options and make some better choices next time I see you.”

Without another word, Bucky and Tony were walked down another hallway, this time toward the center of the jail. The temperature difference was discernable even before they arrived at their new cell, which, once open, they were thrown roughly inside. 

“See you in a few hours,” Tony’s guard called. Bucky crawled to Tony’s side and helped him to sort out his limbs enough to sit upright. He took his chin in his hands to get a good look at his face—pale, exhausted, and still boiling hot. He tapped his cheek until Tony looked at him.

“Okay, Stark,” he began, “we’ve only got a few hours to think of a plan, because you know as well as I do that you can’t survive another torture session.” Tony was shaking, still intensely fatigued but now with the jittery, uncomfortable energy that came with a powerful chemical stimulant. Looking like this, Bucky didn’t think that there was even a chance in hell that he could get Tony out of here alive, but to his surprise, Tony nodded. 

“I’ve got s’mthin’,” he slurred proudly. 


	5. Breath from the Breathing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony is tortured and Bucky has to watch. It's not pretty.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry that this took forever, but I hope it's okay!

Over the next few hours, Tony's condition deteriorated. Bucky could only guess that the drug that they'd injected him with was some kind of amphetamine, because right now what he was doing could only be described as "tweaking." At first, it had given him a lot of restless energy, so much that Bucky had just had to watch him pace the floor so intently that he'd begun to wonder if Tony's plan was to wear a hole in the ground and tunnel out, but when that brief burst of adrenaline had run out, he'd all but collapsed. Bucky had watched him stagger into the wall and slide down it with one hand to his forehead, his eyes fluttering like he was having a hard time keeping them open. 

“You still with me?” Bucky called, not moving from his position in one corner of the room, his arms crossed while he tried to think of a way out of here. He trusted that Tony thought he had a plan, but given his level of coherence over the past day or so, he doubted that plan’s legitimacy and was trying to think of one of his own. Honestly, he had nothing. If Tony’s plan consisted of anything other than attacking a guard and hoping for the best, he’d be impressed, because he was beginning to come to terms with the idea that that might be what they’d have to do. 

“Ugh,” Tony groaned in response to the question. Bucky tried not to think about just how fast Tony’s heart rate was right now as he pressed one hand to the left side of his chest with a grimace and shifted restlessly on the floor. 

“I know,” he empathized. “Sorry.” He didn’t know what he could say to comfort him because he couldn’t reassure him that everything would be okay or that they’d be out soon or that he’d keep him safe. He’d done a shit job of that so far and he knew that he’d continue to do a shit job of it until they got Tony to a real hospital. 

Tony frowned. “What for?”

Bucky gestured to their surroundings. “You should have stayed out of this battle. You would have if I hadn’t given you trouble about it. I didn’t believe you when you said you were too sick to fight, and that’s why we got captured.” Tony shrugged, though Bucky got the distinct impression that it was less from nonchalance and more from the fact that he wasn’t really listening, and even if he was, that he wasn’t understanding. 

Tony began to cough, a choking, wet, productive cough that had him doubling over and clutching his surely-throbbing ribs. The sound of it alone made Bucky wince—he’d only ever had a few chest infections in his life, but he remembered Steve’s, if only vaguely, and one thing that he knew was that a cough like that made the chest very sore very fast, and Tony had been struggling with it for days now. On top of that, the weakness and fever and adrenaline shot were all making his breathing quick and his heart rate skyrocket, which meant that he really didn’t have the breath to spare on coughing, nor the strength to fully expel the fluid in his lungs. He sounded half-drowned, and before Bucky could make his way over to Tony’s side—missing his metal arm was slowing him down—Tony was scrambling to sit up all the way.

“Tony?” he asked, his tone almost panicked. Tony didn’t reply, but instead leaned over one side and began to gag, a horrifying mixture of retching and choking that really, really made Bucky fear that he might aspirate vomit. His body seemed to at least still be able to do one thing right, however, because he stopped coughing just long enough to throw up on the cold cobblestone ground of the cell before turning away from the mess to go right back to choking, this time trying to lie down. At that, Bucky did hurry over to him, pulling him up into a sitting position. He struggled against him in a way that looked so fearful that Bucky nearly let go of him in sheer surprise. 

“D’nt touch me,” Tony slurred, his eyes bright and vacant and full of terror. 

“You need to sit up or it’s going to be worse,” he said, remembering all those nights that he’d threatened other soldiers into giving him their pillows so he could prop a severely congested Steve against them to sleep nearly fully vertically. Tony tried to argue, tried to push him away, but Bucky was persistent and wasn’t going to take no for an answer. What it boiled down to was that Tony didn’t trust him, and it wasn’t as though he didn’t understand why. He put on a good show, just like he always did, the way he dealt with everything, but now that the fever was stripping away the mask, he was left with nothing but a traumatic past, a traumatic present, and no one but the man who’d killed his parents to take care of him. Bucky understood that, but it didn’t mean he’d stop trying. 

Before either of them could win the scuffle, though Bucky was confident that Tony didn’t stand a chance in this state, they somehow heard the sound of approaching footsteps over the noise of the fight. 

“Dinner time,” the guard said, offering a meager plate of what looked like bread and stew meat—both things that would sit so heavily in Tony’s stomach that he was sure he wouldn’t be able to keep them down. As the guard placed the plate down on the ground, he frowned at the sight of Tony and Bucky. 

“Who made this fuckin’ mess?” the guard asked, and Bucky snarled. 

“Your boss drugged him,” he bit, “of course he got sick.” The guard turned his nose up at them both before turning and leaving without a word. When Bucky dared to take his eyes off the door to turn them back onto Tony, he was lying back, lying down as much as Bucky’s arm and torso position would allow him, looking pale and exhausted and ill. He cursed under his breath for no reason other than that this just really fucking sucked. 

“Hey,” he called, “you hangin’ in there?” When Tony barely managed a nod, he pressed his hand to his forehead with a grimace, feeling the heat pouring off it and the dry, alarmingly sweatless skin below his fingers. Soon enough, the guard came stomping back toward them, this time holding a bucket of water and a sponge. The other guard was behind him, pointing her gun toward the two of them as he opened the cell to put the bucket down harshly right by Tony’s face, hard enough that water splashed against it, making him panic all over again. Bucky ran his fingers over his hair, but not through it, as he knew that would be far too intimate a touch for Tony. It seemed to calm him down a little.

“Clean up your mess,” the guard demanded, tossing the sponge into the bucket. Bucky glared as hard as he could, but reached for the sponge anyway, stopping when the guard snatched him roughly by the wrist and pulled him away, twisting it painfully in the process. 

“What the fuck?” Bucky demanded, trying desperately to get back to Tony and failing as he was restrained. 

“Not you,” the guard elaborated. 

“Give him a break,” Bucky ordered, toeing the line between commanding and begging. “There’s no way you can’t see how sick he is. Just leave him alone. He can’t take much more.” 

“Not my problem,” the guard dismissed. “What is my problem, however, is having to clean up a soiled cell. So I’m not gonna.” 

“I can clean it up,” he pleaded. “Just lay off him.” 

“No,” the guard said, his words freezing the air around them all as he spoke. “Then he won’t learn anything.” 

“Just let me—”

“—I said no!” he shouted, jabbing the business end of his taser once more into Bucky’s neck. Searing pain; he was pretty sure he screamed; then nothing. He next opened his eyes to Tony sitting up, albeit barely, slumped heavily over the bucket and lazily, tightly holding the sponge in his shaking hands. 

“Good,” the guard approved, his tone having changed entirely but still not in any way friendly. “Now, clean it up. And for every time you stop, I’ll give your friend another jolt.” Tony mustered up the energy to turn a venomous snarl on the guard but bit down on it when he remembered the taser. Looking like he was barely conscious, he dabbed at the mess with the sponge, periodically going back for more water. Each time he drooped, the guard cleared his throat and Tony perked right back up again, shaking himself to keep awake and rubbing clumsy circles at the ground until it was mostly clean, or at least dissipated. It had taken a lot out of him, and by the time the guard snatched the bucket out of his grip, he wasn’t even coherent enough to say anything. Bucky caught him by the shoulders as he fell forward and saved him just before he could take a bite of the ground. 

“You did good, Tony,” Bucky encouraged. Tony was mumbling something that sounded a lot like an apology, but Bucky refused to believe that. Tony Stark barely apologized when he WAS wrong, so what would he have to be sorry for now? 

“We gotta get out of here,” Tony slurred. “We gotta go.”

Bucky nodded, rubbing one of Tony’s shoulders bracingly just to bring him back down into the moment. 

“Yeah, I know,” he reassured gently. “We will.” 

Tony sobered for a moment just long enough to look Bucky lucidly in the eyes. “You gotta get out of here even if I can’t,” he said. For the first sensical thing he’d managed to string together since they’d been captured, that sure as hell didn't make any sense to Bucky. 

“We’re both going to escape,” he promised. “The others are probably almost here, anyway, right? They’ll find us.”

“Can’t rely on that,” Tony pointed out. “The could… be too late.” He was taking long, laboring breaths at inappropriate times in his sentences, and Bucky recognized the death rattle when he heard it. Agonal breaths. Tony was right in implying that he didn’t have long, but he was oh, so wrong in assuming that made a damn ounce of difference in whether or not Bucky was going to get him out of here alive. 

“What’s that plan of yours?” he asked, tapping at his cheek to wake him when his eyes fluttered shut. “Talk to me, pal. What’s the plan?” Tony looked around nervously before beckoning Bucky close so he could whisper. 

“I saw the arc reactor. The boss has it. I grab it, toss it to you, you activate it. Fly us out.” Bucky’s heart sank.

“That’s a terrible plan,” he said. “I don’t know how to use it.” 

“It’s Stark tech,” Tony bragged slightly. “It practically uses itself.” 

“And how are you even going to get it away from her if your hands are tied, too? It’s never gonna work, Tony.” Tony didn’t look defeated, however. He merely nodded in agreement. 

“But it’s all we got.” Bucky couldn’t argue with that. They’d do what they always did—improvise with what they had, which was never anywhere near enough, and manage to barely scrape by, hopefully still alive at the end of it all. 

“If you think it’ll work,” he finally caved, “then I’m in.” 

The guards led them down the freezing, dark corridor once more, this time into a new room. It looked almost like the hospital lab rooms that Bucky had been in when they’d experimented on him. There were several chairs, one of which he was immediately shoved into, a hospital bed in the center of the room, and a treadmill in the corner. He could do nothing but watch as the guards latched Tony’s handcuffs to the handles of the treadmill despite that he could barely stand upright, much less walk or run, before the Boss came in. 

“You’re looking more awake,” she greeted as though Tony was a friend for whom she’d just bought a cup of coffee rather than a prisoner whom she’d just injected with epinephrine. She didn’t wait for a response as she leaned up against the treadmill like it was a baby grand piano. 

“This part is going to be much more fun than last time; I promise,” she began ominously. “Do you like jogging, Stark?”

Tony gritted his teeth as she turned the treadmill on a very low setting, barely even a crawl, and slowly dialed it up to a comfortable walking pace. 

“For every minute that goes by without you telling me what I want to know, I’ll make you run faster,” she said. Bucky bit back a curse. How the hell was he supposed to catch the reactor while he was cuffed to a chair? Not to mention that Tony’s own hands were tied tightly to the handles and it didn’t look like she was planning on releasing him for any reason, plus the two guards standing in between them. 

“Let’s start with an easy one; something I know just to make sure you’re being honest with me. Where’s SHIELD HQ?” 

Tony didn’t reply even though that one seemed like a freebie, and Bucky couldn’t help but feel a little proud of him. He’d massively underestimated Stark’s loyalties. 

“Final answer?” she asked, and when Tony’s only response was a defiant scoff, she turned the speed up to a power walk. 

Even just sitting up in the cell was hell on Tony’s lungs, so Bucky couldn’t imagine what this must feel like. It had been so long since he’d had any kind of physical ailment that he could barely even remember what they were like, but the agony in Tony’s face was painting a fairly clear picture. 

“When was the last time SHIELD updated their database passcodes?” 

Again, Tony refused to reply, and she turned the treadmill up once more, this time to a light jog. It was starting to get ahead of Tony and he was tripping on his feet, consistently trying to force himself up on knees that wobbled under his weight. Every time he slipped, the treadmill rubbed his knees raw, and Bucky knew it would only be a matter of time before they bled. 

“Fuck,” Tony muttered, “this hurts.” His breathing was quick and loud, interrupted by a lot of heavy coughs that made Bucky skeptical of whether or not he was even getting any air. So much of his lungs had to be water at this point that he was concerned that he’d drown right there on dry land. 

“You’re in full control of how this goes,” the boss reminded him. “If you answer the next question, I’ll slow it down for you. How many layers of firewall protects SHIELD’s databases?” 

“Tony, you can answer,” Bucky called. “SHIELD will deal, but you can’t take much more of this.”

Another long silence and another quiet beep of the treadmill buttons as they took Tony’s legs faster and faster. He was slipping down now, mostly slumped down into the treadmill with his arms far above his head, latched to it. Bucky frantically searched around the room for things that could give them an advantage, or at least a chance. He was about to settle for full-on charging the guards when he was interrupted by a horrible, ugly snap and a cry of pain from Tony, then the next thing he knew, the arc reactor was in his lap. Tony had dislocated his own thumb to wiggle out of the restraints and grab the reactor. 

He had no idea how to use it, which terrified him for a moment before Tony shouted, “FRIDAY, get us home!” and the metal began to envelop him from the waist up. It only took a minute, slicing through the handcuffs like a knife through butter, before he was fully wrapped in the suit, which began to autopilot. He didn’t even have a chance to think about how anything worked or even where they were going before the suit raced forward to scoop Tony up in its arms and took off through the halls of the prison and out the most underwhelming way he could have possibly chosen: through the front doors. 


	6. Obligatory Hospital Recovery Scene

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Finally rescued, Bucky and Tony have a moment together in the hospital that promises better days ahead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can’t believe this took so long, but it’s finally finished! I’m really happy with myself for finishing this story, and I really hope that y’all like it. I think it’s worth a read, and I don’t often say that about my fics. It’s definitely the longest chapter fic I’ve ever written, so new record!! Enjoy!!
> 
> A special thanks to Cat, who has been super supportive of my writing this, extremely patient, and an avid reader. I don’t know if I would have ever gotten around to finishing this one without her, but I’m SO happy I did. <3 You’re the best!!

Bucky laughed with relief as the Iron Man suit sped away from the prison faster than anyone inside could even begin to get themselves together enough to chase them. Tony was right about the fact that his tech could pretty much pilot itself because, despite the fact that he had no earthly idea how he was flying it, their path was steady and stable. 

“FRIDAY,” he called, “where are we going?” 

“The Quinjet is nearby,” she replied. “It appears as though the Avengers were not far from rescuing you. I have alerted Captian Rogers that we are on our way.” 

That was good, he thought. Steve doubtlessly had a plan, one which likely included splitting up into groups to ensure that their captors got what they deserved and that he and Tony got medical attention. They’d probably even get his arm back, too. 

Bucky took the opportunity to look at Tony, really look at him in the light of day rather than the dingy dimness of the cells they’d been in. He hated what he saw. Not only was he deathly pale and filthy from sweat, his hair matted to his forehead from the exertion of the treadmill and from illness, but he was thin, more so than would be possible after just a few days of not eating. He’d heard rumors, several of them from Steve, that Tony was awful at taking care of himself. When the heat was on, Tony was the first to step up and his own last priority.

How, then, was it that Bucky’s perception of him had been so negative? He’d felt genuine shock when Tony had refused to cave under torture despite that, now that he thought about it, he’d never given any indication that he was anything but fiercely loyal to the Avengers and what he thought was best for the world, same as any of them. He was wrong sometimes, but who wasn’t? He’d made mistakes, but who hadn’t? Things often blew up in Tony’s face, but when Bucky really considered it, Tony was always in the blast radius rather than behind the trigger. 

He clutched him a little tighter, as carefully as he coudl but unable to avoid the bloody spots on his hands, knees, face, chest, and neck where the treadmill had rubbed him raw. 

“Just a little longer, Tony,” he murmured, not sure whether Tony was even conscious enough to even hear him.

It was only about ten more minutes of flying before Bucky could see the Quinjet in the distance, and a few minutes more as the group helped him into the jet. Bruce and Thor reached for Tony and he found himself instinctively clutching him closer for just a moment before he shook himself out of it and allowed them to take him from his arms. 

“You’ve got him?” Bucky verified, and Bruce nodded. 

“We’ve got him.”

“Buck, sit down,” Steve instructed as the suit deactivated, shrinking away from his body and into a small metal triangle once more, and Bucky slumped forward into Steve’s arms without its support. “Woah, hey,” Steve cooed, “I’ve got you.” 

Bucky blinked in surprise, allowing himself to be led gently to a seat on the side of the aisle opposite Tony. 

“I’m fine,” he reassured. “Guess I didn’t realize how much it took out of me.” He hadn’t slept since the battle, which had been exhausting, and hadn’t eaten much while captive, either, not to mention the tasers and the worry. His head was spinning, but he wasn’t out of it enough to pull his eyes off Tony. 

“Make sure that whoever is going down there to fight gets a good look at him first,” Bucky said, gesturing to Tony. “See what they did to him.” Steve nodded. 

“What the hell DID they do to you?” Bruce asked. Thor, by now, had joined the others in the back of the Quinjet, and Natasha had replaced him in the front. Peter Quill and Stephen were rustling around in the back, he could hear, and maybe another person or two. Bucky couldn’t tell, but he assumed that was the team that was going to go kick the asses of the Boss and her henchmen. 

“They drugged him,” Bucky explained. “I dunno what with, but somethin’ nasty. It made him all… he really flipped. Got all jittery and anxious, then he crashed.” 

“Probably an amphetamine, then,” Bruce muttered. “How long ago?”

“Hours. Several hours.” 

“Well, he’s not out of the woods, but it’s a good sign that he’s lasted this long.” He swiped a thermometer over Tony’s forehead from the bag that Natasha had brought up for him and cursed. “Over 104.” 

“We’re getting to SHIELD medical as fast as we can,” Natasha said, “but I’ll go scare the pilot into getting us there a little faster.” 

Bruce nodded, turning his attention back to Tony while Steve began to look over Bucky.

“Are you hurt?” he asked, and Bucky shook his head. 

“Nothing major,” he replied. “Not like Stark. His thumb is probably broken, too.”

“How did he get this… God, it looks like road rash?”

“After she drugged him, she made him run on a treadmill while she asked him questions about SHIELD security. Turned it up higher every time he refused to answer.” 

Bruce’s face tinged a little green while Steve’s turned dark.

“What did he give up?” he asked, and Bucky positively glared. 

“Not a fucking thing,” he snapped, “have you SEEN him? Does he look like he talked?”

“Sorry,” Steve apologized, “sorry. I didn’t… I shouldn’t have said that.”

“No, you shouldn't.” Steve was probably a bit confused on Bucky’s 180-degree turn on his relationship with Tony, but after everything that had happened, he wasn’t about to let them assume the worst of Stark for another minute. 

“A team is going to take care of them,” said Steve. “We’ll get your arm back, too.” Bucky just nodded, unable to really make himself care about that. Tony still hadn’t stirred, not even when Bruce prodded his injuries which Bucky knew HAD to hurt. 

“How bad is it?” he asked. 

“Well, the injuries aren’t terrible but the chest infection… it’s got to be pneumonia, and it’s severe. He’s going to be out of commission for a long time, if—when,” he corrected firmly, “when we get the infection under control.” 

Bucky nodded, forcing the verbal fumble out of his mind and trying to just relax until they arrived at SHIELD medical.

Once they were there, things moved quickly, and Bucky was separated from Tony despite his insistence that he didn’t need examining. 

As it turned out, several of the taser wounds were infected. One of his ribs were broken and he had a minor concussion from having been thrown into the cell several times with only one arm to brace his fall, but with everything else that had happened, he’d just assumed that he was just sore. Of course, he was dehydrated and needed a meal, but every step of the way, he asked every new doctor or nurse that came in to treat him about Tony.

Eventually, they had to sedate him. His body was exhausted but he was still too panicked to rest, so despite his protests, the doctors had made the executive decision to knock him out for a few hours for some rest. 

The next time he woke up, he was sore, groggy, and with cotton-mouth from the painkillers. He blinked to clear the sleep from his eyes and when he got his arms beneath him to try to sit up, he realized that there were two of them again. 

“You’re awake,” Steve’s voice came, startling him enough that he apologized under his breath. “How do you feel?”

“What kind of question is that?” Bucky half-joked. “Like I’ve been in captivity for two days.” Steve frowned. 

“Oh, Buck, you were gone longer than that. It’s been almost four days.” Jesus. No wonder the doctors had sedated him. 

“So, what did you do with the assholes who did this to us?”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“I’m fine,” Bucky shugged him off. “A little sore. Brain is foggy.” 

“Probably will be for a while.”

“Which is why I didn’t think it was worth mentioning,” he said. Steve sighed. 

“Nat took care of them.” 

Ah, he nodded. So they were dead. He’d seen the fire in her eyes as she’d looked over Tony’s wrecked body and flayed skin. There was no way she’d let someone walk away from that.

“Has Tony woken up?”

“A few times, but never for long. He’s pretty sick, still, and some of those injuries were worse than Bruce thought. He’s on some heavy-duty antibiotics and painkillers, so he’s pretty much out.”

“Good. He deserves some rest.”

Steve pressed his lips together into a thin line. “Do you want to talk about what they did to you?” 

Bucky gripped his blankets. “Not… yet,” he denied. “It’s nothing personal,” he disclaimed when Steve looked a little disheartened. “Just, it all happened so fast, I had to put it all into some mental boxes that I think I might want to wait until my next therapy appointment to start opening. It might be messy.”

Steve smiled. “As long as you plan on talking about it. I hate how far this is going to set you back.”

“Hey, recovery is a path you walk, not a line you cross, right?” The 12-step program speech beat admitting how much he agreed. “Tony’s probably pretty messed up, huh?” he desperately changed the subject, and Steve ran a hand through his hair. 

“I don’t even know if I should tell you how close he came to not making it, but I feel like you already know that.”

“I was pretty sure another day in that cell would have killed him,” he admitted. 

“Another two hours might have even been enough. The pneumonia is bad. The drug was bad. He flatlined three times, and the third time, they called it. Bruce had to shove past the doctors and use the paddles himself, and it was a miracle it worked that time.” 

“Jeez,” Bucky muttered. “I bet the doctors loved that.” 

“They nearly arrested him.”

“Did he plead the Hulk?”

“It was more of a threat than an argument, but yes,” Steve chuckled. Bucky yawned. “Tired? It’s late. Everyone else went home.” 

“Nah, I’ve been sleeping all day.” He WAS tired, and he knew Steve knew that, but there was no way he’d let him out of the room if he admitted it. “Is Tony allowed visitors?”

Steve blinked in surprise. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you call him that before,” he said. “Uh, yeah, he’s allowed, but I don’t think he’s awake, and you’re not exactly—”

“—I’d still like to see him,” he curtailed. “You know, get the image of the last time I saw him out of my head. Even if he’s hooked up to machines, it’s better than half-dead in a prison cell.”

Steve couldn’t really argue with that. Bucky protested but didn’t FIGHT him on the wheelchair he insisted upon, and Steve took him down the hall to Tony’s room.

Indeed, he was hooked up to a bunch of machines. There was an oxygen mask over his mouth and nose, which was at least better than the ventilator that one of the doctors had mentioned they’d put him on earlier, and an IV with multiple bags of medications were flowing into his arm. They’d bandaged much of his skin and he looked pale as a ghost up against the white sheets, but they’d cleaned him up some from the blood and the sweat and the vomit, and he didn’t look quite so agonized as he had for the past few days. 

Steve wheeled Bucky up to the edge of the bed and stepped away. 

“I’ll be right outside the room,” he said, always able to read Bucky’s needs before he himself knew what they were. “Shout if you need something.”

Bucky waited for Steve to fully exit the room before putting a gentle hand over an undamaged place on his arm. 

“Hey, Tones,” he greeted softly. He didn’t stir. “You were brave, you know that? You did good, today and this whole week. I really underestimated you.” Again, no response. “Actually, I didn’t just underestimate you. I misjudged you. You’re a real good guy, and I can’t believe it took me this long to see that.” 

Tony’s heart rate monitor began to beep a little slower, dropping from what Bucky thought sounded pretty high to a more normal rhythm. Maybe he could hear him, even if he couldn’t show it, but if he were conscious enough to be listening, then he was most certainly alert enough to be anxious. Bucky let his thumb rub Tony’s forearm lightly in what he hoped was a comforting gesture. 

“None of us give you enough credit, and you never ask for any better. Why is that? Why do you let us think you’re such an ass, huh?” 

At that, the corners of Tony’s mouth flickered up a little, and his lips moved beneath the mask. Bucky’s heart skipped a beat, thinking for a moment that he was in pain. 

“Come again?” 

Tony cracked his eyes open like he was squinting against the sun even though the room wasn’t very bright. 

“‘Cause I AM an ass,” he replied weakly, and although he could barely hear or understand him around the mask, Bucky couldn’t help but laugh. 

“Yeah, well,” he chuckled, “you’re an ass who sure saved both of ours today.”

Tony reached up to move the mask with his broken hand, but Bucky knocked it away gently but deliberately. 

“Don’t even think about it,” he threatened. “I know you’ll prioritize sarcasm over breathing, but just… God, just take it easy for a while, okay? You really scared the shit out of me.”

Tony smiled weakly. “Sorry.” 

“No,” he argued, “I’m sorry. For a lot.”

Tony patted Bucky’s hand with his cast and gave a sleepy but reassuring smile. His eyes rolled and fluttered shut, which Bucky took as his cue to go, not wanting to risk exhausting Tony further by overstaying his welcome.

“I’ll be by tomorrow, okay? Get some sleep.”

Tony was obeying the request before he even heard it. Bucky wheeled himself out of the room and Steve took over the reins as soon as he was at the precipice of the door.    
“Did he wake up at all?” he asked. “What did you two talk about? You think he’s okay?”

Bucky shrugged. “I think he will be,” he replied. “We both will.” He’d make sure of that. From this moment on, he’d keep a closer eye on Tony, and once he was finally released from the hospital, he’d refuse to take, “it’s too awkward,” as an excuse to push one another away. Tony was just like him: perpetually unraveling, and he knew better than anyone that once a thread came loose, it was just a matter of time before life pulled it so much that you had to cut your losses and break off the frayed-end piece of who you were before it undid you completely. Tony didn’t like to show those weak spots, but Bucky could at least hope that maybe he’d start now. 


End file.
